Is it unofficial Joys of Censorship Week in Tennessee and no one told me?
Now we have the story of Jackie Sims, a Knox County mother who's going after The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a non-fiction book about a woman who gets cervical cancer and dies and the discovery by her family that her cells were harvested from her without permission and used for a lot of medical advancements.
Sims wants the book banned, because she thinks it's pornographic.
"I was shocked that there was so much graphic information in the book," Sims said.What Sims read appalled her, she said, citing a passage that describes infidelity and another that describes Lacks' intimate discovery that she has a lump on her cervix.
"I consider the book pornographic," she said, adding it's the wording that bothers her most.
"It could be told in a different way," she said. "There's so many ways to say things without being that graphic in nature, and that's the problem I have with this book."
If Jackie Sims had ever looked at actual pornography or read any erotica in her whole life, she would know this book isn't pornography. I can't help but suspect that the truth is that the book's subject matter—not the cancer, but the racist treatment of Lachs and her family, is what actually makes Sims uncomfortable.
I'm not saying that Sims is a racist. Rather, I think that it's really hard for people to face that really bad things happen to people for unfair reasons. I think the problem at the core of the book—that we have a lot of good stuff, a lot of important advancements because people really did wrong by Lachs—is hard to reconcile yourself to.
Most of us try to be good people. We try to instill in the children in our lives the importance of being a good person. As boring and square as being good is, at least you have the comfort of knowing you're not harming people. It's really hard to accept that good people acting in ways they consider good can really hurt people. It's uncomfortable to read about the harm good people can do.
I mean, maybe I'm wrong, but I truly doubt that a teenage boy, no matter how typically teen-age-boy-ish he is, is going to read a description of a woman finding cancer on her cervix and find that sexual. And I just don't believe that Sims, a grown woman old enough to have a high school kid, did either. I just think her discomfort comes from someplace else.
And the uncomfortable thing in that book is not that people get cervical cancer, it's that our medical miracles sometimes come at great moral expense.
